I don’t watch Britain’s Got Talent—Simon Isn’t Interested—but I’m aware from the press coverage that it was won by Viggo Venn, who did a number of comedy routines involving high visibility jackets. I’m surprised that I’ve yet to see even a single think-piece drawing a comparison between the popularity of these comedy antics and the gilets jaunes_ protests.
This seems like fertile ground for an idioticly impassioned opinion piece from either end of the political spectrum. Yet—for reasons unknown—even the most disreputable columnists seem to have failed to scrape this nugget from the bottom of their commentary barrels.
People have said for years that Britain’s Got Talent is on the wane, while its viewing figures have certainly tumbled from the early days, I would have said that it remained part of the wider cultural conversation. It seemed much the same as This Morning: while competitor programmes attract much greater numbers of viewers, it retains a grip on the cultural consciousness.
But this year, I haven’t heard anyone talk about it, and wasn’t even really aware that it was happening—and now its open goal for tedious political commentary has been left untouched.
Perhaps it really is over.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
Imagine that your bank has made an error and erased all records of your assets. Your life is—at least temporarily—devastated. You complain, trying to unravel exactly what’s happened. However, you hit a brick wall when the bank’s senior leaders reveal that they’re not entirely sure what transpired because the issue was discussed via WhatsApp with ‘disappearing messages’ turned on. No permanent records of the conversation were kept.
Imagine that your relative dies in hospital due to a rumoured policy that patients in their condition will not receive treatment. An investigation is launched. It reaches no firm conclusions: the discussions about your relative occurred via WhatsApp, intermingled with messages about children’s piano lessons, and it is deemed in appropriate to disclose those private conversations.
Imagine that you were arrested by the police and detained for 72 hours, without ever truly knowing why. You complain. You are informed that no-one is precisely clear why you were detained: the officers in charge raised concerns with their superiors via WhatsApp, but nobody can recall the specifics, and the phone with the messages on it has broken.
In all of these cases, I imagine you would be outraged. Your outrage would probably be directed at the lack of permanent, contemporaneous records of both the decisions and the processes through which they were made. You’d likely consider the fact that WhatsApp was used to make the decisions as strange and inappropriate, but perhaps a second-order issue.
In the context of the covid inquiry, there is a lot in the press about WhatsApp messages. Their use in Government is frequently defended based on ‘efficiency’. I am concerned that they are only really more efficient because they circumvent processes seen as bureaucratic but which are fundamental to good Government, like contemporaneous record-keeping.
I think the press underplays this issue because they don’t see it: WhatsApp is commonly used within journalism, and for communications between politicians and journalists, so journalists are hindered in being able to take a step back and see the bigger picture of how inappropriate this is.
Take a step even further back and there’s a failure that underlies scores of recent Government scandals, from Partygate, to Richard Sharp, to Matt Hancock’s resignation, to Suella Braverman’s speeding course: the pathological inability of senior politicians to separate their professional roles from their personal lives. I have some sympathy with this, given how all-consuming some senior roles can be, but this ought to lead to particular effort to impose professional boundaries: I see no evidence of this.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
Concern seems to be escalating about the ability of artificial intelligence tools to manipulate or generate misleading images and videos, and the potential for those creations to spread misinformation. Examples of potential alarming scenarios being reported based on this sort of stuff are emerging with increasing frequency.
Nevertheless, I’m reasonably relaxed about this. I believe—perhaps naively—that we are merely witnessing the latest stage of a long period of refining our relationship with visual media.
Our relationship with photos and videos remains quite new, and is constantly evolving. The principle of ‘seeing is believing’, in photographic terms, is a fairly new concept—and has probably never quite been true.
In the fairly recent past, photos and videos were a rare commodity. Television broadcasting of the proceedings in the House of Commons began only within my lifetime. Easy access to digital photography, including among professionals, is an even more recent development. Full-colour newspaper supplements, brimming with photographs, also materialised during my lifespan. In fact, I was attending university before the first full-colour newspapers appeared.
The rise of Photoshop made us doubt the veracity of photographs we were seeing. The Guardian initially banned digitally altered photographs, and amended its Editorial Code in 2011 to allow them only if explicitly labelled as such.
The advent of mobile photography and social media revolutionised our relationship with photography all over again, as Nathan Jurgenson has compellingly argued. Jurgenson’s work is especially apposite here, in fact, as he argues that photographs rarely stand alone these days, but form part of larger conversations. A faked image has less impact in that context.
There’s an argument that in rapidly developing situations, fake photos can have an outsized impact. But that is only true while we are in the temporary, short-lived, and rapidly eroding cultural moment when we assume photographs are accurate representations of events.
Increasingly convincing fake imagery simply teaches us to be more sceptical of what we think we are seeing. It’s another step down a road leading us away from a very recent, and very temporary, and very limited assumption that imagery can tell an accurate story.
Just as we’ve all learned over millennia to be sceptical of hearsay in the heat of the moment, so we’ll come to be sceptical that photos show a true picture.
We’re in a uniquely precarious cultural moment right now, while we’re still coming to terms with this change. But long term, this all simply leads us to fall back on the things we’ve always fallen back on.
We trust the sources we trust because we judge them to be trustworthy. Shortcuts to that conclusion—like the implied authority of appearing on television or having a ‘verified’ status on social media—unfailingly turn out to be temporary and misleading. We don’t believe news stories solely because of the pictures—there often aren’t pictures.
Part of being human is working out who and what is trustworthy. We get it wrong sometimes, and that’s part of being human too. But it’s a skilled honed over the whole of evolution, and we’re pretty darn good at it—photos or no photos.
The images in this post were generated by Midjourney.
Wendy and I have both enjoyed watching Ted Lasso, the not-really-about-football comedy drama series which reached its conclusion1 after 34 episodes this week.
The prevailing opinion seems to be that it was a programme that found an audience during covid because of its warm-hearted nature, but which went off the boil thereafter, and most especially so in its final season. Many have commented that the expansion from 20-ish minute episodes to 80-ish minute marathons served the show poorly.
I disagree. I enjoyed the series from start to finish. It’s not one that will live long in my memory nor that I feel especially attached to, but it was good, heartwarming fun.
This book was a 2019 bestseller, which has since been adapted into a TV series. It’s author, Brodesser-Akner, is a celebrated writer of magazine features.
It took me over a month to plough through this. I didn’t exactly dislike it—it had some sparkling writing, and some great one-liners—but I didn’t feel particularly engaged, nor did I develop any emotional attachment to the characters.
The novel is set in New York, and initially focuses on Toby Fleishman, a hepatologist in his 40s who is estranged from his wife, Rachel. Early one morning, she drops their two kids off with him, and then disappears from their life.
The novel is oddly structured. The narration for the greater part of the book is told from Toby’s perspective, but by a named third-party narrator, Libby. Later in the book, Libby also narrates from Rachel’s perspective, and from her own perspective. This doesn’t seem to add much, but does make things unnecessarily confusing at times.
I didn’t really find myself drawn into this book. Unusually, I am quite interested to see how it translates to television, so I might seek that out at some point. But really, this book just didn’t resonate with me.
A few highlighted passages:
In the park, the beautiful young people—they were all beautiful, even if they weren’t—would be lying out on blankets even this early, their heads tilted up toward the sun. Some of them were sleeping. Back when Rachel consented to go on long walks with him, they would make fun of the sleeping people in the park. Not the homeless people, or the strung-out ones. Just the ones who’d made their way over to the park in their sweatpants, laid out their blankets, and pretended that the world was a safe place that only wanted you to be well rested. Neither of them could imagine having so little anxiety that you could fall asleep in the middle of a park in Manhattan; the anxiety was a thing they had in common to the end.
His former intern Sari posted a picture of herself bowling at a school fundraiser with her husband. She’d apparently gotten three strikes. “What a night,” she’d written. Toby had stared at it with the overwhelming desire to write “Enjoy this for now” or “All desire is death.” It was best to stay off Facebook.
He marveled for the millionth time that summer about how a person could be this miserable and bewildered, and this horny and excited, all at the same time. What a piece of work is man.
People who are good don’t need ambition. Success comes and finds them. See? Competence and excellence are rewarded for those who are competent and excellent.
“Marriage is like the board in that old Othello game,” he said as he ate a chicken breast baked dry, no added oil, please. “The board is overwhelmingly full of white discs until someone places enough black discs in enough of the right places to flip all the discs to black. Marriage starts out full of white discs. Even when there are a few black ones on the board, it’s still a white board. You get into a fight? Ultimately fine and something to laugh at in the end, because the Othello board is still white. But when it finally happens and the black discs take over—the affair, the financial impropriety, the boredom, the midlife crisis, whatever it is that ends the marriage—the board becomes black. Now you look at the marriage, even the things that were formerly characterized as good memories, as tainted and rotted from the start: That adorable argument on the honeymoon was actually foreshadowing; the battle over what to name Hannah was my way of denying her the little family she had. Even the purely good memories are now haunted by a sense that I was a fool to allow myself to think that life was good and that a kingdom of happiness was mine.” (I told him I understood his metaphor, but also that’s not how you play Othello.)
Toby left the room and found his fellows right outside the door, waiting for him. “What is wrong with you all?” he asked. They looked surprised.
“Dr. Fleishman?” Logan asked. Joanie and Clay looked at each other.
“You were making notes while that man was crying.” Toby began walking and they followed, but then he stopped and turned to face them. “You have to look these people in the eye. This isn’t organs. This is people.” He kept walking and arrived at his office. “The people who come to you—they’re not here for checkups. By the time they get to you, they know something is wrong. They’re sick. They’re afraid. Do you know how scary it is for a body you’ve had your whole life to suddenly turn on you? For the system you relied on to just break down like that? Can you just close your eyes and try to think what that might feel like?” He was filled with disgust for the three of them and the way they looked bewildered. “Maybe you should all go into surgery if you hate people who are awake so much.” He walked into his office and before he closed his glass door, he said, “I’m very disappointed.”
“It seems so clear to me,” she’d said, “that the ocean would rather you didn’t surf on it. If it wanted you, it would give you a more sustained wave.”
“I think that’s the point,” he’d said. They were sitting on the bench on their balcony, she upright and he lying down, his legs crossed over her lap.
Twitter has evolved into a platform that is indistinguishable from the wastelands of alternative social-media sites such as Truth Social and Parler. It is now a right-wing social network.
He points out that
In just a few months, Musk has actively worked to elevate a particular right-wing, anti-woke ideology. He has reinstated legions of accounts that were previously banned for violating Twitter’s rules and has emboldened trolls, white-nationalist accounts, and January 6 defendants.
I’m not on Twitter, and so have nothing to measure this up against. But I’d observe that we’ve seen lots of large media organisations exit the platform recently.
Hypothetically, I don’t think I could imagine a caption on the BBC’s flagship television news programme promoting their political editor’s Truth Social profile, if such a thing were to exist. Is it reasonable for them to continue to promote Twitter like that?
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
The greater the physical distance between the decision makers and those affected by the decisions, the less relevant the decisions appear to the people impacted by them.
This rings true, and chimes with discussions I often have about senior leaders in large organisations.
Wendy and I have both worked in plenty of large organisations, inside and outside the health sector. Over time, we’ve observed that the more successful senior leaders tend to be those who spend a lot of time—perhaps even the majority of their time—with staff members from across the organisation and with customers / patients / service users. The least successful tend to be those who talk a lot about their ‘visibility’ and ’open door policy’ but whom the majority of staff members rarely, if ever, see in the flesh.
That is, the successful hospital chief executive is the one who stalks the wards and corridors, the one you might accidentally bump into on a ward round or in a clinic and think little of it. They know the organisation from top to bottom because they live it. They thank every staff member with genuine earnest, they are encouraging, they are interested in every person’s role. They harness the power and energy of the organisation they lead to make arguments about funding for them.
The unsuccessful hospital chief executive is the one who makes videos and blogs, whose visits to the wards are an ‘event’ to be prepared for and photographed. They judge success entirely on key performance indicators, and intuit the culture from surveys and managerial reports. Nobody really knows them locally, but they’ll trade on their personality and achievements with national leaders to try to drive the organisation’s interests.
The successful leader of a national organisation is the one who pops up in every regional outpost now and again. They often use them as a base when they have meetings in the area, which they do frequently because they don’t want a HQ-centric view of the world. You might accidentally bump into them in the kitchen and think little of it. They understand the tensions between parts of the organisation because they are surrounded by them. They hear about people’s successes organically, and celebrate with them, and lend an ear when times are tougher. They drive the organisation forward in an organic and engaging way, and use the reputation of the organisation they build to convince funders to follow their lead.
The unsuccessful leader is the one who holds webinars about how open they are, whose visits to ‘the regions’ involve lots of pre-planned choreography and dedicated ‘come and talk to me’ sessions. They judge success based on PowerPoint presentations, and understand the culture to be what people declare it to be. They are aloof and distant to staff, but chummy with those who set the organisation’s remit and hold the purse strings, using their person cachet as a tool to influence.
And lo, I present the ‘Simon’ theory of large organisation leadership. The successful leader of a large organisation intuits that their job is to build confidence in themselves among staff members, and confidence in the organisation among funders and external partners. They prioritise internal management, absorbing and influencing the culture, selling their vision, and making people believe that the organisation’s goals are worthy and achievable. They delegate even the most important external-facing discussions, using their limited access as a tool, appearing in the room to apply the final thumb screws and to seal the deal.
There are caveats: the leader must understand that their internal role is leadership, not management, lest they breed a culture of micromanagement or promote the acquisition of a set of what the military would call ‘long screwdrivers’. The leader must be reasonably personable to avoid appearing to ‘hover’ unnervingly. The leader must be skilled at knowing how and when to ‘fix’ things, and when to just listen.
This theory is based on my cumulative zero years of leading large organisations, and inspired by my burning desire to absolutely none of it in the future.
Maybe I can spin this off into one of those awful airport bookshop leadership tomes?
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
It has been asserted that we live in a ‘Post Truth’ society, where political debate is hampered by an inability to agree on basic facets of reality. This assertion holds true in many instances.
There are those who struggle to grasp the many meanings of the word ‘true:’ the moment someone uses a phrase like ‘my truth,’ they implausibly claim that veracity—‘the truth’—is the only sense in which they understand the word. It’s disheartening that they must go through life without any true friends.
So, I was delighted by the last section of the most recent episode of Politico’s podcast, ‘Westminster Insider.’ In the episode, Ailbhe Rea discusses the art of the political interview. In the final section, she addresses the disastrous interview which prompted Andrea Leadsom to withdraw from the Conservative leadership election in 2016—the infamous ‘motherhood’ interview.
Rea conducts interviews with both Leadsom and Rachel Sylvester, the journalist who interviewed Leadsom. The two have markedly different recollections of the crucial part of their interview which, on first hearing, seem entirely irreconcilable.
The genius of this episode lies in the fact that Rae then plays the dictaphone recording of the original interview for the listener, without comment. It immediately becomes apparent that the seemingly irreconcilable accounts are, in reality, both accurate.
Naturally, Sylvester and Leadsom’s recollections differ because they are viewing the same encounter from different perspectives, focusing on different aspects of it. Neither is recalling the complete picture: and with only their own perspective to work from, how could they?
The episode serves as a poignant reminder that disagreement on basic facts is not always born of deceit: sometimes, recollections can differ in ways that are entirely honest. Despite appearing contradictory, neither Leadsom nor Sylvester’s account was inaccurate. ‘Facts’ that appear mutually exclusive aren’t always so.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
‘Staining wooden furniture’ is nowhere to be found on the very short list of DIY tasks at which I’d consider myself vaguely competent. It’s something I’ve never tried to do. Staining furniture has a reputation as being a messy and difficult task which carries a high risk of ruin.
Yet, our IKEA outdoor furniture was looking a little worse for wear, and it was obvious that re-staining was in order. I reasoned that I might as well give it a go—the worst that could happen would be a need to get new furniture, which would probably also be the result of not staining it. I visited my local Wilko and procured some Ronseal wood stain, a sanding block and some paint brushes.1
To further reduce the risk, I started with our table-top because IKEA sells those separately, so if I ruined it, I could easily replace it. I gave the top a very light sanding with the sanding block, just smoothing off any rough patches, and then applied the first coat of Ronseal with a paint brush.
I was surprised that it turned out to look absolutely fine. I went on to re-stain the rest of the furniture, and to complete the three recommended coats over the course of the day.
It doesn’t look perfect, of course, but it does look much better than when I started. I enjoyed spending six hours or so in the sunshine with nothing to do but a low-stakes, physically undemanding bit of DIY. It was a mental rest that I wouldn’t have given myself any other way.
The image at the top of this post was generated by Midjourney.
Our local IKEA doesn’t stock IKEA’s own wood stain, which is a bit of a head-scratcher. ↩
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